Was I Impacted by Neglect?
#20 in the series: What I Wish I had Known Before Beginning Therapy
Many have shared with me that they seem to have many of the symptoms of being impacted by trauma, but they do not remember their childhood as traumatic. In an email I received last week, a reader alluded to this. She said,
For me, I had the black cloud I have heard you speak of since I can remember, but I couldn't point to a reason why. Because I had no "big T" traumas that I could point to, it was an endless tunnel of "Why am I like this?!" and "why does my faith not work?!
The experience of trauma is subjective, especially during childhood. While many use the categories of Big and Little T trauma, this minimizes or ignores the ongoing impact of toxic stress. Most often, Big T trauma is thought of as physical or sexual abuse. The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) research study also includes neglect and household dysfunction. All of these can result in being impacted by trauma even when someone cannot identify a specific traumatic event.
Notice that “emotional” is included in two categories. In one instance it is under the category of abuse (what was done to you). The other is under neglect (what was withheld from you).
You can learn more about ACEs, and complete the questionnaire here. I learned very quickly, while speaking at in-person events not to have people complete this in group settings. It is not uncommon for adults to recognize they have been impacted by trauma as a result of completing the survey. This may be true for you and if so, be gentle with yourself and reach out for professional help.
In the book, What Happened to You (a must-read!), Dr. Bruce Perry describes how abuse and neglect can sometimes be intermingled with nurturing care. Neglect or abuse is often minimized in our memories since it is seldom all-encompassing and often the unpredictability of care is the most impactful.
“The most common form of neglect is fragmented, patternless caregiving. Some days when the infant cries, adults come to feed and nurture them. Other days, no one comes. Still other days, someone comes and yells at, shakes, or hurts them. This confusing, chaotic world is very dysregulating. The infant gets insufficient “structure” to send a clear, organized set of signals to the developing systems in the brain. The infant’s world is unpredictable, and the result is a ‘chaotic’ neglect” (162).
When neglect mixes with times of nurturing care and there are no recognizable episodes of overt abuse, it is so much harder to identify the impact—especially, if it occurs early in life. Early neglect is pre-verbal and only recorded in the brain as emotional memories. The timing of neglect and abuse matter—as explained by Dr. Perry:
If, in the first two months of life, a child experienced high adversity with minimal relational buffering but was then put into a healthier environment for the next twelve years, their outcomes were worse than the outcomes of children who had low adversity and healthy relational connection in the first two months but then spent the next twelve years with high adversity. Think of that: The child who has only two months of really bad experiences does worse than the child with almost twelve years of bad experiences, all because of the timing of the experiences. (109)
Many parenting books over the last few decades got this wrong! The following (from a previous newsletter) may have been part of your story and because it did not occur in overtly abusive homes, it might be difficult to realize the impact it had on you.
“Most of the prominent parenting advice promoted by religious leaders and churches lacked any understanding of how the child develops into a healthy human being. Many practices such as having babies cry it out impacted children’s attachment relationships and kept parents from being present during their child’s distress. When the child stopped crying it was due to exhaustion and a realization that no one was coming. Parents missed the opportunity to soothe or co-regulate—the very way children learn healthy self-regulation.”
At the core of many mental health struggles is the lack of a healthy early childhood attachment relationship with a caregiving adult whether through abuse or neglect, intentional or unintentional. Identifying something that you never received (neglect) is so much harder than identifying something that happened to you (abuse). It is simply a hole that exists, that cannot be explained, and nothing seems to fix. It is possible to heal through attachment-based therapies, but, as was true in my case, it is far more difficult than healing from specific traumatic events.
What I wish I had understood before beginning therapy (I finally got here) is that working to heal from the traumatic events of my childhood was an essential step in the healing process but would not automatically remove the impact of inadequate attachment and what Dr. Perry identifies as chaotic neglect.
An adult who experienced adequate attachment and consistent care as a child will be far less impacted by traumatic events—and healing will be less fraught with complications. For those who experienced neglect, even when the trauma is resolved, they may be left with endless what-is-wrong-with-me feelings that seem to have no source. I wish I had understood how very normal this is! There wasn’t anything wrong with me—bad things happened to me. And in the case of chaotic neglect, good things were missing.
It is possible to heal with the help of attachment-based therapies, but for me, it is far more difficult than healing from traumatic events. Next week, I will discuss what I wish I had understood about healing from inadequate attachment and the wounds of neglect.
Source for Quotes: Winfrey, Oprah; Perry, Bruce D.. What Happened to You? Flatiron Books. Kindle Edition.
Note: All information and resources presented in these newsletters are drawn from my personal story and do not replace professional psychological care for mental health issues. My legal and ethical advice is always to seek professional help.
It’s so easy to minimize when what did not happen is the problem. The term “chaotic neglect” is helpful to me. (This is really what I experienced with one of my parents.)
Will you say more about attachment-based therapies?
Thank you for all of this!
This resonates so much. Thank you.
I recently read “Adult children of emotionally immature parents” by Lindsay Gibson and that was really helpful to understand the parentifiction I went through and how they couldn’t handle my emotions (let alone theirs) and so I grew up in an emotionally neglectful environment and I had to manage their emotions instead.
It is so sad that it takes so much work to undo the harm done in those early years. It is beautiful when attachment goes right and tragic when it goes wrong.